As a result of the now nearly universal migration in the business world from paper-based documents to electronic documents, document management has become a significant issue for large, mid-size and even small companies, firms, and organizations.
Old, obsolete, and redundant documents consume large amounts of server space in networked computer systems. As a result, these entities may be required to constantly increase server space or resort to frequent backup and purge operations which may be expensive and impractical to implement. Furthermore, with the now common practice of emailing documents between computers, a single document may spawn multiple different documents or versions stored on one or more different computer systems. Backup and recovery systems may exacerbate this problem because these systems merely take a snap shot of existing documents—documents are often subsequently updated or changed and these new versions are also saved without reference or index to earlier versions. Also, when a user copies a document off of a network server onto a local computer system such as a laptop or other off-network computer system, network controlled file maintenance systems may be unable to perform routine deletions or other file maintenance operations. These factors may combine to increase the complexity of document management and retention for information technology (IT) administrators.